The Dematerialization of School
Recently my colleagues and I were sent the following links to the newest wave of the future—online college courses—as recorded in the pages of the newspaper of record for the Manhattan culturati once known as the New York Times and now more appropriately yclept the Senile Gray Lady.1 Here they are for your re-education:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/us/05college.html?_r=1&ref=education
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/world/europe/01iht-educLede01.html?ref=education
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/us/05ttcredits.html?ref=education
Because some administrators seem to be toying with the idea of imitating this movement at our high school, I would like to say why I think that—except for those too physically disabled to attend live classes—online schooling is a terrible idea.
Years ago my teacher Mary Holmes observed that the world was becoming increasingly dematerialized, more and more human experiences becoming virtual ones. We punched thermostat buttons instead of piling logs in hearths or stoves; we squeezed paint tubes and clicked ball-points instead of grinding colors and ink; we spoke into devices instead of face to face; we went to movies, watched TV, and listened to tapes instead of attending live theater and concerts. To no one’s surprise the process has continued, so that we may now have a vast music collection the size of a credit card, to say nothing of the credit card itself, and find worlds of information on a computer the size of an old ink pad. Without experiencing the sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell of any natural thing, we can order online our food, clothing, furniture, cars, houses, pets, and bedmates.
It is ironic that in the age of so much concern over the extinction of animal and plant species and the supposedly man-made decay of the condition of earth, air, and water, we are so passionately devoted to living with less and less actual participation in nature, including our own nature. Mary said that anyone who lives without animals and angels—must we now add plants?—lives an impoverished life. Perhaps it is a result of our becoming so completely abstracted from our natural lives that we imagine we are but glorified machines, complex interlocking biochemical computer networks rather than Donne’s “subtle knot”2 of nature and spirit.
Though Mary warned against trusting anyone whose voice could not be heard without the aid of sound amplification, a principle all the more applicable when all we can see of the person is an image on a screen, she would not have said the process of dematerialization was simply bad; much practical advantage has been gained by it. Google Earth technology reduces collateral damage in warfare and gets us to someone else’s church on time. But much is also lost. Let us set aside for the moment the particular losses in my field: the annual reduction in the length of sentences that my sophomore students can understand, and their increasing conviction that grammar and paragraphs that they cannot comprehend instantly they cannot comprehend at all. Considering the efficiency and convenience gained, what is the general educational downside of dematerialization?
The downside is the attempt to reduce the experience of self in the world to bits of information. Despite our prejudices and our abstractions, we are not in fact merely glorified computing machines. We remain natural beings, compounds of soul and body alive in a natural world, requiring meaning to be happy and harmonic psycho-physical experience to find meaning. And, as many believe about other inorganic behaviors (pollution of air, adulteration of food, steroid-enhanced athletics), it is not nice—or safe—to fool with Mother Nature. Just as the picture on the Wheaties box is not breakfast and cyber sex is not love, so the aggregation of online information is not education.
Education involves not merely the transfer of bits of information but the experience of relation—between a learner and a teacher who himself or herself embodies a relation between person and subject, person and skill, life and art, body and mind—in short, the relation between human being and world, including other human beings.
In the 16th century, Montaigne wrote the following:
Those who would divide our two principle parts, and isolate one from the other, are in the wrong. On the contrary, we must reunite them and bring them together. We must command the soul not to draw aside and hold herself apart, not to scorn and abandon the body—which she can only do by some false pretence—but to ally herself with it, help, control, advise, and correct it, and bring it back when it goes astray; in short, marry it and become its partner, so that their actions may not appear diverse and opposed, but harmonious and uniform. . . .
The Peripatetic school [i.e., Aristotle and his followers], of all sects the best adapted to society, assigns to wisdom this sole task, to provide for and procure the common welfare of these two associated halves. And it points out how by paying insufficient attention to the existence of this bond, other schools have taken sides, some for the body and some for the soul, with equal error on both sides; and that they have lost sight of their subject, which is man, and of their guide, which they generally admit to be nature.3
A live teacher engaged with students in conveying a discipline is the embodiment of the fruitfulness of a harmonious natural marriage between body and soul. The dematerialization of learning threatens the fruits with abortion.
What stands to be lost in the online classroom is quality—not merely in the vague sense of a “high quality education,” but in the sense of the very particular quality of an experience, the kind of quality that is irresistibly experienced when in the presence of one who has it or who can convey it—as we experience not only the fact but the feel of a great basketball player’s three-point shot or the uniqueness of soul in a Rembrandt face—the kind of quality that cannot be reduced to bits of information, no matter how powerful the hard drive.
The other day when a student asked what “skulking in corners” means, I moved over to the corner of the classroom and skulked. Present to the experience, even if they thought I was a nut, my students realized what I was doing, in part by their empathic response to my demeanor before and after the illustration as well as during it. What would it look like on a screen? Would it read? Would the feeling come across? Perhaps the idea of skulking would. But would viewers sense the teacher’s willingness to look like a fool for their sakes? Could they experience the potentially illuminating revelation of the complex relation between word and world?
I don’t mean inordinately to glorify my own teaching or the significance of such an action. I do and say a hundred things a day that are forgettable and are mercifully forgotten. Yet there is a connection between teacher and students in a classroom that cannot be conveyed on a screen. Metaphors for that relation—ambiance, tone, interactive tension, chemistry, electric charge—try to say what there are no words to say. As with the taste of a food—just try to tell someone who doesn’t already know it what the taste of milk is, or of a green pepper—the attempt to convey in words the student’s experience of being in a classroom is hopeless, as is the attempt to characterize the teacher’s experience of the quality of the particular grouping of students that constitutes a class. Yet those experiences are real, and they matter.
My point is that only live experience can yield true knowledge of such qualities, and only one with that knowledge can be the judge of whether a virtual classroom has succeeded in conveying what is valuable in the experience (let alone that such knowledge is often not known to have been gained until many years later). Students treated to online versions of any class will believe they are getting all that matters. But they cannot know whether it is so. Only by experiencing both the unmediated event and the online version could they make a just comparison, and the last time I checked, human beings (as opposed to their disembodied images) still cannot be in two places at once.
If we go down the route of online schooling, we will never know what we have lost, just as, at this very moment, almost none of my students have any idea what it takes to grow a carrot, milk a cow, or shear a sheep, or to cut grass with a scythe, or to wait until the library opens to find a fact in a book. I am not here opposing the valuable conveniences of supermarket, power mower, and Wikipedia. I am trying to express the inexpressible richness of the life that is lost when we substitute virtual experience for real. We divorce our bodies from our minds, as Montaigne warns us not to do, and take disembodied mental experience for authentic natural life. We praise convincing 3-D images in the movies when we’ve never jumped a fence to escape a threatening dog.
When I read poetry aloud, and get my students to recite it, I am trying to do something like magic, to give them the awareness of how in a great poem meaning is incarnated in form. This kind of knowledge can be taught only as a combination of speech and kinesthetic experience. Students need to feel the air vibrations coming from my speaking of the words, not from an electronic speaker reproducing that gesture. And they need to see and feel the visceral awkwardness of other living people when they speak the words badly, and the aha! that fills the room when they speak them well. There can be no such interchange of the living experience of poetry in an online classroom. And the same goes for chemistry experiments and history lessons and math problems solved on a blackboard. Can the particular quality of the movement of a history teacher’s finger on the board from the miracle of 1776 to the disaster of 1789 reach through cyber-space with its true weight and meaning and with the corresponding scintillation of her voice?
All who have ever paid to hear a live concert of their favorite band will agree that there can be no substitute for presence, which ever and always has the potential to burst, as my friend Charles Embree’s Judge Bat Savannah would say, into a Moment of POW, which stands for Presence of WOW, which stands for Wonder of Wonder.
Mary Holmes taught an absolute principle of art: “The greater the work of art, the worse the reproduction.” I think the same applies to the art of teaching. Little may be lost in putting online a class given by an uninspired teacher droning boring facts in a spiritless way to a class of rote learners with no higher aspirations than a grade on a test, though even then I would argue that there is some potential for the students’ boredom to compel the teacher to think twice about what he or she is doing. But when the teacher has any hope to engage, or the students the potential for excitement, or the content any significance at all, the loss in trying to go online—as in any artificial reproduction of the incarnation of meaning in form—will be both literally and figuratively immeasurable.
___________________________
1. cf., “Pop Goes the Times” in The New Criterion, November 2010.
2. “The Ecstasy,” l. 64.
3. Essays, Book II, Ch. 17: “On Presumption,” tr. J.M. Cohen (Penguin, 1958).
posted by GRap | 10:06 AM
9 Comments:
I concur. I have noticed a trend toward students taking "online" courses. Sadly the reason is typically one of the following:
1. Student couldn't qualify for an AP level class at his "regular" school
2. Student wants to be guaranteed a higher grade than he/she might otherwise earn
One must remember that most of these "online" classes are run by "for-profit" businesses that are only concerned with money and not at all with actual learning. I watched a student take on "online" exam once...with his book in front of him the whole time. When I questioned him about this, he said the instructor told him it was okay. Right. The funny thing is this may well be the case.
As for being disconnected from nature, we see this all the time. I recall one friend whose nephew enjoyed his day visiting a farm where they saw cows grazing. A week later they were enjoying a steak and my friend asked his nephew how he liked his steak. He said it was great. Then he asked him where he thought it came from. His reply..."the supermarket". He proceeded to explain to his nephew that the steak they were eating was "Oscar", one of the cows he had seen earlier at the farm. The nephew was stupefied. The sad part is the nephew was not a 5-year old, but a 12-year old.
Dr Rap
I'm curious about what you think about this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg
Right after watching it I immediately thought, "I wonder what Dr Rap would say?" It's funny how coincidently you had just posted about a similar topic. In the video, Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford, talks about time persepctive, but interestingly towards the middle of his lecture he ties the subject to technology and the education system.
-Victor
Thanks for reading, Victor, and for the link.
My reaction to the Zimbardo lecture (which seemed to be condensed from a longer talk) is that his divisions in the first part of the talk give a marginally useful if reductive perspective on facts that are familiar (the differences between northern and southern Italy, or Protestant and Catholic Europe, for example, or the differences between hedonists and planners), though I don’t see how they required “thirty years of research” to be discovered. People can be categorized in many ways, and his, like others, can shed some light, particularly, as he says, when the recognition of differences in time perspective can help to resolve personal conflicts.
In the later part of the talk, too, I quite agreed that we underestimate the power of technology to rewire people’s brains. However, when he implies that there is little to be done about this effect except to be aware of it, I object. I object to the implication that certain people, as if by deterministic nature or inevitable training, are either present-oriented or future-oriented, that kids reared on computers are doomed to being bored in traditional classrooms. Merely to observe and not to war against their technological addiction and their consequent boredom with the great past works of human imagination is to sell our youth down the “present-hedonistic” river. It is a counsel of despair. Zimbardo is absolutely right that we can’t have family values without family meals. But to be aware of his statistics is not enough. We need to work all the harder to foster family meals, to rewire for civilization, to train the young in reading and in concentrated thought. It is not enough merely to observe the technologically wired youth from the high ground of statistics and experimentation while they sink deeper into the electronic quicksand. They need to be thrown a rope.
Hi Dr. Rap,
I am confused by one aspect of your essay and hope that you can clarify your opinion for me. Your argument seems to be that online education is not a suitable alternative for in-class teaching because digital “classes” do not convey the same personal, visceral interactions that actually being there does. As you outline in the first part of the essay, you consider the substitution of button for burning wood, screen for book and recording for live performance to mean a substitution of more superficial knowledge for true understanding. How do you think that this disconnect relates to writing? How can you justify education through books when scrolls of velum with personal handwriting could be used instead or constant personal tutelage? Did the printing press limit or extend the scope of human understanding? It seems to me that writing is yet another form of substitution for human interaction. But you seem to be in favor of writing while against other records.
I understand that sometimes writing is the only choice because the thinker herself is dead or too far away to interact with personally. This is not necessarily true with online classes which are sometimes taken instead of attending a real class that could be easily accessed. Writing is a way to preserve a person’s thoughts, or at least their memory, because writing is able to traverse both time and distance. I believe this is what you told us about Shakespeare’s sonnets in 9th grade (Sonnet 19 or 71?). However, I do not think that this is the only reason you praise the written word. You do not read aloud to your students just so they can hear the sound of another person’s voice. You read to convey meaning but you are getting this meaning from a medium that has been divorced from the “original.” All the same, I do not think that you became an English teacher because writing is just the best acceptable stand-in. You believe that writing has something of its own to offer. I think that the “online world” has potential to have similar value.
(continued)
(continued)
Rather than writing off online classes because they are currently poor substitutes for classrooms, I think that we should encourage the collaboration of these two different ways of encountering information so that learners can be ever more enlightened and lifted into the electronic ethers.
That was all a very long way of asking where you place writing on the human information scale. What you described in your essay seems to be a black and white distinction between human presence and recorded substitution. At the same time, you allude to the fact that “meaning is incarnated in form.” Do you think that the “electronic quicksand” is inherently devoid of this same ability to hold meaning in form or do you think that it, like an oil painting, a great work of music or the written word, has something to offer as well?
Thank you for your time!
~A former student
P.S. I am sorry that this is riddled with typos. Unfortunately, I have an exam tomorrow and would love to spend more time being clearer and more precise but I just don’t have very much time!
I did say that teaching is an art, but I would distinguish between it and the arts Anon uses for his analogies. It is true that artists may come to do great things when a new medium is developed—print, oil paint, moving pictures. But the art of teaching—of conveying a discipline or body of knowledge to a student—has not significantly changed in thousands of years regardless of changes in other media: The teacher explains, illustrates, and judges, responding to the particular need of the moment for the student and demanding a kind of attention the student on his own cannot perhaps imagine giving. Great art may appear in a new medium, but that does not alter the need for the student of fundamental bodies of knowledge and skill to be in the presence of a teacher.
[As an aside, Anon implies that development in the arts is linear, one medium arising to supplant another and yielding great art of its kind in due time. This is perhaps too hopeful. What he is ignoring is the long—sometimes very long—ages of darkness that can set in before a new vision, whatever its medium, comes to birth. When the vision of an age is benighted or corrupt, its works will follow suit, no matter the medium. I find my computer very useful. But I have yet to be shown any art in the computer medium that does not participate in the relative artistic shallowness of our age. This lack of vision is not the fault of the medium, but neither can the novelty of a medium substitute for the presence of vision.]
I agree that “Just because you encounter something ‘virtually’ does not mean that you do not have a real experience.” But the reality of it is not the same thing as the reality of the non-virtual experience it imitates. The push to reduce the classroom to video feed arises from the belief that knowledge gained in a classroom is merely information. Computers do very well at conveying information with speed and convenience, where information is all that needs to be conveyed. And where that is the only access, I suppose it is better than nothing. But the experience of education is more than the aggregation of information, and that “more” cannot be reduced to digital bits and still hold its value.
My point is not that nothing valuable will come through the computer. My point is that people schooled on it will not know what they are missing, namely what can be conveyed only in the living presence of a master.
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As someone who teaches online classes, I've experienced and pondered some minuses and pluses of the medium:
Many online classes are less than rigorous and seem designed more to confer a degree for cash than to educate. (But then grade inflation is also part of the face-to-face school system--which has become increasingly focused on benefits for educators and administrators rather than educating students. What percentage of kids in the LA County school system, for example, are simply passed to the next level without having acquired the skills that were supposed to be a prerequisite for going to the next level? A safe estimate would be a quarter. Fifty percent would not be a preposterous guess.)
There are many students in online "colleges" who should not be there--who are not capable of putting together coherent sentences. (Just as a large percentage of high school seniors in the LA school system should not be there, but rather in the ninth, seventh or fifth grades. And I am quite sure that grade inflation at the face-to-face college level is not unrelated to the corrolation between students in seats and the financial welfare of teachers and administrators.)
A large number of online students are working fathers and mothers who simply could not work a community college or a regular university program into their lives. These are not individuals who lack interaction with other human beings. They are often folks with highly responsible jobs (and a few kids) who need a degree simply because a degree (any degree) is viewed in our "credentialed" society as a prerequisite for many jobs--whether the credential is actually related to the person's capacity to do the job or not. In those cases the online degree facilitates the acquisition of a "credential" that the individual shouldn't have to acquire in the first place--making the best of an unfortunate situation
It is quite easy to cheat when doing online work--though there are mechanisms that the online education groups have devised to detect plagiarised work. (It is also, however, easy to cheat on any work done outside of the classroom in a face-to-face school. And students are becoming increasingly talented in the art of cheating in the actual classroom. And one might argue that it is easier to cheat outside the classroom in a face-to-face educational environment because the instructor is less likely to be utilizing tools that help identify plagiarised work.)
No online experience can replace a great teacher, but there aren't many of those creatures. I've spent more hours in classrooms at various levels than is good for anyone's health. I can count on one hand the number of great teachers I've had. If a student really wants to learn, and if the student is lucky enough to get an instructor online who can facilitate and nourish that desire, then quite a lot can be achieved. After all, there are lectures by some of the greatest professors and thinkers in the world that are available online--on CDs. Utilizing these resources a student can have as their virtual instructors some of the best minds of the last century, even if they are no longer alive.
Then there is the matter of schools being used for political indoctrination. This activity is so prevalent in the Humanites that putting a greater distance between propagandists and students can be viewed as a positive development--especially for students who are only in school because they need a job credential. The textbooks of the online school are likely to be as politically onesided and doctrinaire as those in a face-to-face school (A communication course, for example, praises THE NATION as an unbiased source of information!)but at least the student isn't exposed to regular personal indoctrination in the classroom. Put succinctly, so many educators in face-to-face schools are so bad and so politically motivated that being physically removed from them could only be viewed as a blessing!
Food for thought.
While my own observations about online learning and the use of technology has shown me that we have to be careful not to see this as a substitute for good classroom teaching, certainly online learning and technology can be used to augment the classroom. A bad teacher is a bad teacher whether online or in person. I think the difference is that in the case of a bad classroom teacher, one feels as if one has some recourse. With online courses, you would have to fight to get a refund. Good luck with that.
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